Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Sapphire Slipper

They eyed one another, wordlessly consulting on whether to tell her the truth.

“We’ve met one another,” Tracee said finally. “Hung out with one another and our guys. Heck, our periods are even in sync.”

The others nodded glumly. Temple had heard of that: women in close proximity or in families tended to ovulate, and everything else, at the same time.

The Fontana brothers’ girlfriends formed quite a little “family” of their own.

“So when Aldo broke the circle, so to speak,” Alexia said, “when he announced he was marrying a stranger, we all just went bananas for commitment.”

“Wait a minute!” Temple shouted into the muttering of bridesmaid indignation at being left at the altar unwed. “Who was Aldo’s girlfriend? Before.”

The silence that greeted her very apropos question lasted a long time.

For, of course, she was the obvious prime suspect: the woman who could never join this jolly little group again. The one Aldo never moved up from “girlfriend.” The one Temple’s aunt Kit had replaced.

“There wasn’t one, at the moment,” Wanda finally said.

“How long a moment?”

“For about a year. She was a performer at one of the acrobatic shows.”

“Was?”

“She fell and broke her neck.”

Temple felt her stomach flip over. Fell. Dead. Like Max, maybe, who lived to tempt fate with spectacular aerial stunts. That was the nightmare, anyway.

“How awful,” Electra said, her voice throbbing with empathy.

“They’d been together nine years,” Jill added, choking a little.

“I see why—” Electra didn’t finish her thought. Why Aldo had flipped for Kit and decided to marry her. He knew what loss was.

And all these women knew it too. Time could be short.

Temple, being advertised as the city’s “finest little private eye,” had to ask herself an unpleasant question. Had Aldo’s girlfriend just had a tragic accident, or had it been murder too?

Memories of the Fall

“Garry,” Max asked the man he believed had been his mentor and “handler” since he was seventeen, “why do I have a psychiatrist assigned to me?”

Garry was wheeling him through the gardens again, after having checked the wheelchair and Max’s pajamas for recording devices the size of a flea, or not much larger. He had graduated from the butt-baring hospital gown.

“They claim it’s standard practice for victims of head injury and memory loss. That makes sense. This is a world-renowned facility. I’ve looked into Mademoiselle, or Fraulein, Doctor Schneider’s professional and personal background. She is highly qualified. Degrees from Heidelberg and the Paris Psychiatric Clinic. She travels all over the world, at stratospheric fees, to discreetly aid some very global players. Rupert Murdoch has used her, not personally.”

“Who’s paying her in this case?”

“We are. You, actually.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand dollars for three weeks, a renewable contract.”

“Fifty thousand? For a little knee patty-cake? I must have a lot more money than I know, but I don’t think I’d spend it on this. Fire her.”

“It might look suspicious if you didn’t get the best of everything, Mr. Anonymous world-class, rich man mountain climber. Or that I wasn’t as concerned as the doctors about your memory loss. Which I am. She might do some actual good. And what’s with the knee patty-cake?”

“My patty, her knee. But she put it there first.”

“Do you think she’s trying to pump you?”

“Please put that more genteelly, Garry. I can’t tell if she’s a sincere therapist, or a sinister inquisitor-cum-watchdog masquerading as a sexy lady. She’s clever. Mentally agile. As with a lot of Frenchwomen, flirting is a genetic marker. Mostly, I think her sessions are worthless for liberating my memory, but good for my ego.”

“So she could be worth it under the label of ‘morale’?”

“Under the label of ‘not looking suspicious, and doing what they tell us.’ She does exercise my wits.”

“Your casts are coming off soon. Then it’s physical therapy.”

“No. I want out. You say I have good instincts. I’m sensing an . . . atmosphere here. I’m being watched. The minute these casts are cracked open, you break me out. Say we’re using a private therapist at my fabulously equipped retreat in . . . Bahrain.”

Garry chuckled. “The details may be escaping you, my boy, but your style is perfectly intact. You always could charm the snakes into the basket.”

He hadn’t wanted to trouble the old man. He knew he was being watched by a lot of people, people patients weren’t expected to notice, like cleaning personnel, nursing aides, certainly Mademoiselle Fraulein Doctor Schneider. He was also going crazy kept down and inactive by these damnable casts. Did he really need them? Were they a ploy to keep him prisoner?

Then the memory of his body soaring toward that shiny black wall from unsupported space returned. He was lucky to be alive. Like a drunk driver, she’d said, too out of it to tense up and get really hurt. He wheeled himself to the window, back and forth, a form of pacing he couldn’t manage physically.

Was he really that in command of his mind and body, enough to convert that fatal hit into a minor accident? Certainly he hadn’t managed to keep his memory. But memory loss in severe accidental injuries is common. What wasn’t normal, at least for his expectations; it wasn’t coming back. The memory. His legs weren’t the problem. He was relatively young. They’d heal. He was an athlete of sorts, even if he didn’t buy the role of mountain climber.

He expected more from his memory. From himself. Damn it! Now was not the time to have a little brain crash! He paused to stare up at the postcard peaks rising like a colossal shark’s maws around him. He shivered. Cold. Icy. Killing. Everything he didn’t like in a landscape. Everything he didn’t like in a woman.

Ladies-in-Waiting

Temple moved on to the parlor, where Kit had corralled the Sapphire Slipper’s staff.

Kit came snowshoeing over the thick wool carpet to Temple like a happy puppy.

“I’ve been getting acquainted with the girls,” she whispered. “What a tragicomic bunch of life stories! They’re a whole play by Eugene O’Neill via Neil Simon. They make A Chorus Line look like Little Orphan Annie . I’m getting an idea for a revue here. A play. A novel!

“A bunch of women are trapped in snowstorm in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas , only it’s in Nevada—maybe the mountains, there’s snow there, right?—and there are no men in the cast. Just the women talking: whores and wives and would-be wives. Wolves howling in the distance—”

“A perfect offstage role for the Fontana pack,” Temple interrupted.

“Wolves? No, these would be real wolf voices, tribal brutality at bay, the Taliban, maybe—”

“Kit, I hate to derail the creative muse when it’s mingling Medea with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with White Fang , but I just learned something pretty awful, and—worse—maybe relevant.”

“About what?”

“About who,” Temple whispered, grabbing her aunt’s thin wrist and pulling her into the archway to the bar, where Fontana Inc. awaited under the supervision of Van von Rhine. “The girlfriends said Aldo’s significant other died a year ago. She was an aerial performer and fell during practice. Broke her neck. Did you know that?”

Kit had sobered instantly, plunging from creative mania into deep concern.

“Yes. He told me, of course. He said he liked that I did something safe. What could happen to a writer?”